Download Lee Daniels' The Butler movie in HD, DVD, DivX, iPad, iPhone

(Download Lee Daniels' The Butler) Broad in scope, politely political, tight with history-book bullet points, and rife with all kinds of distracting stunt casting, Lee Daniels’ (Precious, The Paperboy) new film is destined to have a long future in classrooms across America. “Inspired by true events”,(Lee Daniels' The Butler Download) The Butler tells the life story of Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), a venerable African-American man who served as White House butler for every U.S. president from Eisenhower through Reagan.

(Download Lee Daniels' The Butler) Through his humble (and horrifying) beginnings as the son of indentured cotton pickers in the South (played by Mariah Carey and David Banner), to his college aged son’s close involvement with radical civil rights movements throughout the 1960s, his life permeates most the major cultural shifts and presidential stories of the past sixty-plus years.

As Cecil’s story effortlessly unfolds, he Forrest Gumps his way in and around the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., The Nixon scandal, The Black Panther movement, and Reagan’s non-dealing with South African Apartheid. All the while,(Download Lee Daniels' The Butler Movie) he’s earning a fraction of what a white person doing his same job would be earning. Yet he does his job proudly and professionally. It’s never unclear that Cecil is a man from a particular time and place, with expectations and beliefs that correspond – for better or for worse.

(Download Lee Daniels' The Butler Movie) The news regarding Forest Whitaker is both positive and negative for him: He’s so apt, so natural in his portrayal of the mindful Cecil, the performance is effectively invisible. So invisible, it’s quite easy to overlook when singling out elements in the film worthy of praise. Cecil is just a guy; a guy who came from a terrible background, but somehow found himself working in the most well known house in America. Although the film subtly loves to hammer the point of Cecil’s subservience (particularly in the face of his son’s contradictory Black Power efforts), the fact of the matter is that he’s a great butler, and loves his job. Lee Daniels doesn’t shame him for this, but Cecil does nonetheless experience an arc, eventually finding his voice, and in recognizing the vitality of things he previously dismissed or ignored.

(Download Lee Daniels' The Butler) Obviously intended as a magnet for film awards, The Butler is the kind of glaring “prestige” picture that mostly manages to transcend its Harvey Weinstein-manufactured template. All the parts are in place: A venerable real life protagonist, check. Historic roots that are relatable check. Characters overcoming adversity, check. The gusto to be political, but the good sense not to be intimidating or “dangerous” about it, check. And, a competent string of eyebrow raising casting choices filling the roles of Important Historical Figures… check?

(Download Lee Daniels' The Butler) The on-and-gone presence of the celebrity presidents is the films greatest attention getter and also its most rickety aspect. Robin Williams plays Eisenhower skillfully while John Cusack does a stringy-haired and rubber nosed impression of Nixon. Alan Rickman does a surprisingly good Reagan while James Marsters plays JFK well, but looks nothing like him. Liev Schreiber does an intense and focused LBJ. (Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter are ignored.) And in perhaps the ultimate political stunt-casting coup, Jane Fonda shows up as Nancy Reagan. All of this adds a distracting texture to The Butler, as each of these people score an average of maybe one minute of screen time apiece. These famous face surrogates pop in just long enough to allow audiences to wonder, “Is that Richard Dreyfuss…? Why no, it’s Robin Williams!”, and then the film moves on. These commander-in-chief impressions are there to give us just that – impressions of the various administrations. Just as popular history has painted them, some presidents fare better than others in the likability department. (The film is sympathetic to the latter two while the former three… not so much.)

Famous figures glimpsed outside the White House most prominently include Malcolm X (played effectively enough by Shirley Puhg) and Martin Luther King Jr. (Nelsan Ellis, saying some good lines, but looking more like a skinny Apollo Creed.) The presence of these characters, while welcome, is a bit dodgier than that of the presidents. That Cecil’s son (David Oyelowo) would find himself in close proximity to so many legendary civil rights leaders and personalities that utilize differing ideologies and methods is far more Gump-ian than his father’s cinematic life.

(Download Lee Daniels' The Butler) Only in a movie with this many attention-getting famous actors filling unlikely famous roles would the key presence of Oprah Winfrey as Cecil’s wife be this off-the-cuff. Perhaps Daniels cast the supporting roles the way he did for this very reason, to buffer Oprah? In any case, she’s good. Hers is a performance that may very well garner significant acting nominations. Of all the Oscar-bait going on in this movie, this is the most obvious and most logical: Oprah has a lifetime achievement Oscar, but never one for acting. She defines and embodies major success for African-Americans; she is an icon. And yet here, she goes the distance acting a flawed, tarnished and sometimes-trashy character. Her character stands by her man – except for when she doesn’t. She smokes, she swears, she gets disgusted and envious of her husband’s job (which he doesn’t talk about at home), she wears silly “Soul Train” jump suits and 1980s warm up suits, and eventually grows old on film. Her character was a real woman. An obvious Oscar-grab? Yes, all the ingredients are there. But I say give her the nomination. It is earned.

The Butler spends its running time asking the question of how different Cecil’s White House job, waiting on powerful Caucasian men who routinely make decisions that negatively impact his own minority right before his eyes, is versus his horrible boyhood in the cotton fields, where liberties were publically taken with his mother, and worse. (Make no mistake; The Butler gets off to a downright sickening start.) Just because Cecil is okay with his lot in life, should he be?

(Download Lee Daniels' The Butler) In the end, the election of Barack Obama becomes the necessary glimmer of hope and change in Cecil’s world. Such a notion feels very 2008, but one must remember that Obama’s greatest significance – the symbol of a an African-American being elected to the highest office in the land – truly does matter to so many in terms of racial perceptions. Hence, the film spares Obama the hammy personification his presidential predecessors received. He exists in the world of the film through enigmatic images and audio of the real life man, speechifying.

(Download Lee Daniels' The Butler) That the film is thought provoking but non-confrontational in its challenges and questions is to its power, and is in step with its protagonist’s sensibilities. It is a good film, if a bit fast and loose at times. It may even be an important one. However, the fact that when Hollywood sets out to showcase its best-of-the-best African-American talent, it continues to do so in the context of stories that are primarily about being African-American. Which is of course very, very rarely the case with Caucasian actors. This then, is perhaps the next divide to be conquered, and something that films like The Butler (and before it, Red Tails – with which it shares many cast members, including Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr.), with both its feet planted firmly in the past, are less equipped to do. But for what it sets out to do onscreen, The Butler mostly effectively, if times unevenly, accomplishes.